Anna Woltz and Vicky Janssen
Girl from Mars
An insightful look at a young person’s struggle with gender dysphoria.
Evert loves mermaids, Barbies and his sister’s dresses. As a preschooler, he hated his penis, and he dreams of having a smooth body, like the girls he knows. Evert wants to be a girl like that himself. But his parents send him to football and forbid him to grow his hair.
Anna Woltz based this book on the life of Vicky Janssen, who knew at an early age that she had been born in the wrong body and underwent sex-reassignment surgery so that she could live as a woman. With Evert, Woltz gives a voice to a child’s struggle with gender dysphoria. In a direct, documentary-like style, she describes the difficulties between Evert and his parents, the bullying at school and how he eventually finds his way into the medical world that helps him to become who he always was.
